A commonly invoked anti-hacking law is so overbroad that it criminalizes conduct as innocuous as using a fake user name on Facebook or fibbing about your weight in a Match.com profile, one of the nation's most respected legal authorities has said.

The Australian media, communications and technology industries have been urged to act as a united front in the creation of a new public policy framework by former UK communications minister, OFCOM's founding CEO and current Alcatel Lucent President and MD for Europe Middle East & Africa, Lord Stephen Carter.

Razr, now there's a name for Motorola to conjure with. In its first two years the hugely popular V3 clamshell sold over 50 million units but then Motorola became so dependent on it that when it stopped selling, the company's market share collapsed.

In one fell swoop, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg set back the women's movement. By declaring an "ambition gap" between men and women, suggesting that "until women are as ambitious as men, they’re not going to achieve as much as men," Sandberg defined 'success' in such a narrow way that most women (and men) can never attain it. More saliently, far fewer may want to.

Ed Vaizey said that introducing a "right to be forgotten" into a revised EU Data Protection Directive might give "false expectations" to people who would seek to have their personal data deleted under the new regime.

Since being redirected away from Bush-era plans for a base on the Moon towards a manned Mars mission, NASA has realigned its nuclear-tech-in-space efforts away from a Moonbase powerplant and towards an atomic-powered rocket able to get astronauts to the red planet quickly, without receiving dangerous exposure to cosmic radiation.

Even as the world goes cloud/SaaS, monitoring tools have stayed doggedly old school. With the rise of complex web applications, the cloud, DevOps, agile computing, and continuous integration, application changes are rolled out much more frequently than the one or two times a year of old enterprise software updates, with multiple changes taking place as often as every day.

Here are the latest odds on the Student Cluster Competition online betting as of 10am SC11 time (Pacific). Betting will close out on LINPACK late this afternoon, since the teams will be turning in those results at 17.30 Pacific on the dot (1.30 GMT 16 November).

JustPictures has been my preferred app for managing photo galleries for nearly a year but a recent slew of upgrades - some cosmetic, some more fundamental - have elevated it to a level were it now deserves a strong recommendation.

Blighty's famous force of Harrier jump-jets, controversially disposed of during last year's defence review along with the Royal Navy's aircraft carriers, have been reprieved: the radical vectored-thrust jets, believed by many to have been the best strike planes in Britain's arsenal, will fly (and almost certainly, fight) again.

Love it or hate it, it's impossible to ignore Halo's legacy. With the exception of Super Mario, no other videogame series has been as critical to the success of its target platform - or as influential on the videogames industry as a whole.

Red Hat doesn't just want to run your apps on its OpenShift cloud. It wants you to code, compile, tweak, and repeat the process on its cloud until you get the applications just right and get rid of that workstation or heavy laptop you lug around.

The latest boffinry news brings good news for beer lovers: statistics have shown that moderate quaffing confers a significant benefit to cardiovascular health. You will actually be noticeably healthier than a teetotaller if you down a little more than a pint a day on average, and as healthy as a teetotaller if you drink a bit more.

Top boffins at the Large Hadron Collider – mightiest particle-punisher and largest machine of any kind ever assembled by humanity – say that they may have uncovered a vital clue explaining one of the greatest mysteries of physics: namely, how is it that matter itself can exist?

China’s NUDT (National University of Defense Technology) shocked the world in 2010 when it unveiled the fastest supercomputer known to man, the 1.86 Pflop Tianhe-1A. It came out of nowhere and caught the entire industry by surprise.

Team Costa Rica is another first-time entrant in the 2011 Student Cluster Competition in Seattle. Their official name is Tecnológico de Costa Rica, but to me they’re the Rainforest Eagles, and they’ve earned respect for not only representing their entire region but for the hardships they overcame to make it to the SCC.

The team from Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University is on a mission: to become the first university to repeat as Student Cluster Competition champions. The team in Seattle this year is almost entirely new, but they have the same coach and have been mentored by their predecessors from the 2010 championship team.

Purdue is one of two teams that’s participated in the SC11 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) since its inception. They’re a solid team with a half-n-half mixture of rookies and SCC veterans. This year they’re bringing the typical workmanlike Purdue attitude to the competition – along with a plethora of traditional HPC gear.

Many years ago, in Galaxy magazine, Jerry Pournelle devoted his A Step Farther Out column to describing how satellites could be used to harvest solar energy on a scale impossible underneath Earth’s atmosphere.

An internet standard on online privacy is expected to be published by the middle of next year. In the meantime, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released a first draft of the so-called "Do Not Track" (DNT) mechanism, with input from the major browser makers.

OpenCL, the open-source standard for programming heterogeneous computing systems – aka CPU/GPU mashups – has reached version 1.2 with the ratification and public release of its latest specification documentation.

Jen-Hsun Huang, one of the cofounders of graphics-chip maker Nvidia, never intended to be a player in the supercomputing racket. But his company is now at the forefront of the CPU-GPU hybrid computing revolution that is taking the HPC arena by storm as supercomputing centers try to cram as much math into as small a power budget as possible.

Adobe is to hand over its Flex SDK, which lets you develop applications for the Flash runtime using XML and ActionScript code, to an open source foundation. The company is committing to HTML 5 as the “best technology for enterprise application development”, according to a statement issued on Friday, November 11 by two Adobe product managers.

Computer scientists say they've identified a fundamental flaw in the Bitcoin electronic currency system that could eventually stunt its development unless developers change the way users are rewarded for their participation.

Intel Capital has unveiled a new $100m AppUp Fund to jumpstart companies developing content for its online Intel AppUp Center store, which is currently limited to software running on Windows XP, Windows 7, and MeeGo devices based on the Atom processor.